Here’s What NOT Using Cloud Storage Is Costing You

It’s no secret that doing nothing is often considered a safe bet. The psychology behind inaction is well understood, particularly in the case of IT — the path of least disruption is usually maintaining the status quo rather than trying something new,

But once in a while, a decision of inaction can prove very costly. For instance, would you ignore leaky plumbing in your home? Barring any flooding or damage, there may not be much urgency to act — perhaps until the water bill arrives, at which point you experience a change of heart. But what if the leak preexisted before you moved in to the home and you never realized you were overpaying for water to begin with?

Cloud storage presents a very interesting analogy to the above situation. You may never realize how much unnecessary spending is a part of maintaining traditional storage until you examine some of the cloud-based alternatives.

Take for instance a hypothetical organization using 50TB of storage capacity today. Let’s examine the cost of traditional storage versus cloud storage using a few reasonable assumptions:

Cost of traditional storage: $1500 per TB for traditional on-prem storage with 25% in annual maintenance. Assume replacement every 3 years

Cost of cloud storage: $0.026 per GB per month for cloud storage (using Google Cloud Storage pricing). Assume another 50% for bandwidth (downloads) and puts/gets. Let’s call it $0.039 per GB per month total

Starting capacity: 50TB

Capacity growth: 30% annually

Storage price reduction: 20% annually

Administration and physical costs are ignored for now

Below is a chart that illustrates the differences in total cost of ownership (TCO) between cloud and traditional storage over the next 9 years:

So how can the the gap between cloud and traditional storage be so substantial? Some will argue $1500 per TB is expensive for a storage system, as raw disk can be purchased for $100 per TB from an e-tailer. But raw disk capacity does not make a high-durability, always-on storage system. Most enterprise storage utilizes RAID protection which raises costs and reduces usable capacity. Furthermore, enterprise storage typically requires multi-site redundancy for disaster recovery. In that light, $1500 per usable TB is a great, if not implausibly good, deal.

Contrast that to top tier cloud storage, which comes standard with triple data center redundancy and intra-site redundancy. Cloud storage requires virtually no maintenance or replacement ever, avoiding the 2 replacement cycle “spikes” for traditional storage. What’s more eye-popping is that this comparison does not take into account the administrative cost savings of cloud storage — doing away with day to day tasks such as failure management, maintenance, upgrades, etc — nor does it take into account the environmental costs — power, cooling and floor space.

What’s missing in the comparison? A way to deliver cloud storage as a replacement for traditional storage. Cloud-integrated storage provides that route, offering the familiar interfaces and performance of local storage and enabling the cost saving of cloud.

Next time you are budgeting for data storage, consider the cost of maintaining the status quo.

Nicos Vekiarides is the Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of TwinStrata. He has spent over 20 years in enterprise data storage, both as a business manager and as an entrepreneur and founder in startup companies.

Prior to TwinStrata, he served as VP of Product Strategy and Technology at Incipient, Inc., where he helped deliver the industry's first storage virtualization solution embedded in a switch. Prior to Incipient, he was General Manager of the storage virtualization business at Hewlett-Packard. Vekiarides came to HP with the acquisition of StorageApps where he was the founding VP of Engineering. At StorageApps, he built a team that brought to market the industry's first storage virtualization appliance. Prior to StorageApps, he spent a number of years in the data storage industry working at Sun Microsystems and Encore Computer. At Encore, he architected and delivered Encore Computer's SP data replication products that were a key factor in the acquisition of Encore's storage division by Sun Microsystems.

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